Gone in Minutes, Out for Hours: Outage Shakes Facebook

Web Desk:

According to Down Detector, a website that monitors app outages in real-time, social media platform Facebook and its family apps were crashed and inaccessible for hours on Monday for thousands of users around the world.

Meanwhile, people who weren’t able to access all Facebook-owned apps rushed to Twitter, and within minutes Twitterati started to share their reactions to the “ordeal” and to troll Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Several of the reactions included hilarious rants and GIFs about the situation.

When Instagram & Facebook are down. pic.twitter.com/mVFlVOOCOC

— Netflix (@netflix) October 4, 2021

Mark Zuckerberg trying to fix the WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook crash.#WhatsApp #instagramdown #Facebookdown pic.twitter.com/fE6Bo5pX6q

— Yaseen Khan (@yaseen_khan81) October 4, 2021

Mark Zuckerberg at Parent company of WhatsApp Facebook and Instagram headquarters right now
Sala kya ho gya isko 😖#facebookdown #WhatsApp #instagramdown pic.twitter.com/02PTIdIoN6

— Renu Tiwari (@RenuTiw36829938) October 4, 2021

Social media platforms WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram responded to the global outrage, saying that they were working on fixing the outage. Taking to Twitter following the outage, WhatsApp tweeted that it is working to resolve the issue and asked users to be patient.

After the most-used smartphone messaging application, WhatsApp, suffered an outage of hours, its CEO, Will Cathcart, announced the restoration of the messaging app, saying WhatsApp is “back up and running.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg also reacted to the disruption of services of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. He apologized to users of the services and announced the restoration of their operations.

Taking to Twitter, Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer also offered an apology and in a later tweet, he announced the gradual restoration of Facebook.

Facebook blamed a “faulty configuration change” for a nearly six-hour outage that prevented the company’s 3.5 billion users from accessing its social media and messaging services such as WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger.

The company, in a blog post published late on Monday, did not specify who executed the configuration change and whether it was planned but said that its systems were back up and running. The company said it had “no evidence” that users’ data had been compromised during the outage.

As our platforms are coming back online, we wanted to share some more information about today’s outage and what caused it. https://t.co/JkZnn2I37g

— Facebook Engineering (@fb_engineering) October 5, 2021

Facebook, which is the world’s largest seller of online ads after Google, was losing about $545,000 in United States ad revenue per hour during the outage, according to estimates from ad measurement firm Standard Media Index. Facebook shares fell 5.5% in afternoon trading on Monday, inching towards its worst day in nearly a year. The social-media giant’s instant messaging platform WhatsApp was also down for over 35,000 users, while Messenger was down for nearly 9,800 users.

Meanwhile, the major social networking apps faced the major outage other social networking sites gain popularity as well. The messaging service Telegram went from the 56th most downloaded free app in the US to the fifth, according to specialist firm Sensor Tower. The encrypted messaging app Signal tweeted that “millions” of new users had joined, and added that it was “Signal and ready to mignal.”

Millions of new people have joined Signal today and our messaging and calling have been up and running but some people aren't seeing all of their contacts appear on Signal. We're working hard to fix this up.

— Signal (@signalapp) October 4, 2021